The harder question, I think, isn’t whether or not we’d have them at all, but what changes would have come as a result of removing one link in the chain. Without Everquest or Ultima Online, would the genre have exploded the way it did? In fact, looking back further, the removal of either Meridian 59 or the original (AOL) Neverwinter Nights would have changed a ton. Taking out Rogue from the history of computer games would pretty much guarantee a change in virtually every hack and slash game out there, even if they were still around in a different way.

I guess that to put it in a simpler light, my view’s that MUDs – and P&Ps, and wargames, and even more ‘real’ aspects of history, are all somewhat essential links to the genre of MMOs _as we know them_, if not in entirety. MUDs didn’t cause MMOs, but they were a link in the chain leading up to them.

And as for persistent worlds, now I’m trying to remember what Legend of the Red Dragon was like…

With that in mind, I would tend to agree that MMOs (as we know them) would have arisen without MUDs (as we’ve come to think of them). It’s like the Beatles analogy. Rock and roll did, in fact, evolve out of jazz and blues and what have you, almost spontaneously, from multiple sources. Elvis was already rocking before Paul or Ringo.

On the other hand, it seems to me that someone would inevitably make a MUD on their way to making an MMO. The first MMO would have been prototyped with a text-based interface, and then the designers would say “Hey this is actually pretty fun. Screw the graphics. Let’s ship this and see how well it does.”

We would probably have had more games like Neverwinter Nights too. That type of game is the logical progression from tabletop RPG to multiplayer game.

Most other multiplayer games have evolved from single-player games either by allowing cooperation (perhaps extended with PvP dueling) or letting other humans play the opposing forces: Diablo (8 player max, coop or pvp), first person shooters (8-64 players PvP or team-PvP), real time strategy (4-16 players coop or opposed), RPGs – e.g. Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights (6-8 player story-based coop).

It’s a testament to existing MMO’s that people have used Neverwinter Nights to create MUD/MMO-like persistent worlds. It was not a given from the game design.

The step from game to virtual world came with MUDs: Unlimited simultaneous players and, more importantly, a persistent world. A game world that exists even when I’m not in it.

The rest has been slow evolution. Looking at the text-commands in Everquest (e.g. /emote) shows a direct line of evolution from MUDS. Meridian 59 was even closer. WOW was hevaily inspired by Everquest (and by other games inspired by Everquest), just as Everquest was inspired by what came before it. It has been a slow evolution, with most of the DNA of MUDs still present in modern graphical MMO-RPG’s. The games today are more alike than they are different, and most of the “fancy new features” of MMOs can also be found in modern muds.

The only real quantum leap was the shift to a persistent world, and that came from MUDs.
The rest are details.

Keen – I serve up the metaphors just to let you take a swing.

Then you have those of us who have been around since the old guard first surfaced and recognize that the sacred cows (and their guards) have their place… out to pasture where they may live peaceful and happy lives NOT trying to hinder the forward motion of this growing industry.